Bilara Jataka

The Buddha told this story, No. 128 of the Jataka collection, at Jetavana monastery concerning a monk whose outward conduct looked impeccable, downcast eyes, measured steps, and quiet speech, while he secretly pursued greed and deceit behind that careful performance. The Buddha told the assembly that this was not the first time such a brother had worn the appearance of holiness to conceal harm. He recalled an old tale from the forests near Benares to show exactly how such a disguise once worked, and how it was finally seen through.

Long ago, when Brahmadatta ruled in Benares, the Bodhisatta was born as a rat, large as a young boar and uncommonly intelligent even among his kind. In time he became the leader of a great colony, hundreds of rats strong, living together in burrows near a quiet stretch of forest and foraging each day in safety and good order.

A roving jackal happened upon this thriving colony and began scheming how he might beguile and eat them. He understood at once that an open attack would only scatter the rats into their burrows and leave him hungry. So he resolved on a subtler approach: he would make himself appear so holy that the rats would come to him willingly rather than flee.

The jackal climbed onto a nearby anthill, faced the rising sun, and stood motionless on one leg with his mouth held open, as though breathing in nothing but air. When the rats grew curious and approached, he told them his name was Dhammika, the Godly One. He explained that he stood on a single leg because the earth itself could not bear the full weight of his accumulated virtue. He faced the sun in reverence, he said, and took no food at all beyond the air itself, wishing harm to no living creature.

Awed by this display of apparent sanctity, the rat colony began paying homage to the jackal each morning and evening as they passed his anthill on their way to forage. The Bodhisatta himself, finding nothing obviously wrong with such devotion, allowed and even encouraged this daily ritual of respect toward the seemingly pious stranger.

What the rats did not see was that each time their procession filed back past the anthill, the jackal seized the very last rat in line, carried it off, and ate it in secret before resuming his unmoving, saintly posture as though nothing at all had happened. Night after night, the colony grew quietly, invisibly smaller.

Eventually the other rats noticed that their numbers were shrinking and brought their worry to the Bodhisatta. He thought back over how full their ranks used to be and how depleted they had become since the holy stranger arrived. A suspicion began to form that the jackal's piety and the colony's losses might not be a coincidence.

To find out for certain, the Bodhisatta arranged to walk at the very back of the line himself during the evening procession, placing himself exactly where every vanished rat had last been seen. As the rest of the column passed safely by the anthill, the jackal, expecting an easy meal exactly as before, sprang.

The Bodhisatta had anticipated the attack and was already in motion, leaping clear and wheeling around to face the jackal before the strike could land. He called out before the whole colony that this so-called saint's holiness was nothing but a cloak worn to deceive guileless creatures while a predator's true nature lurked beneath it. Then, in the same motion, the rat king sprang at the jackal's throat and bit through his windpipe, ending the deception for good.

Having exposed and ended the jackal's scheme, the Bodhisatta spoke a verse to the assembled colony, one that has been preserved exactly as the old telling gives it: that wherever saintliness serves only as a cloak to beguile the innocent and shelter a villain's treachery, a cat-like nature lies beneath it waiting to strike. The verse's image of a cat, rather than the jackal of the story itself, is a curiosity the old tellers kept rather than smoothed away. It gives the tale its name, the Bilara Jataka, the Cat-Nature Birth Story. Yet the predator in the action of the story is a jackal throughout.

When the telling was finished, the Buddha identified the hypocritical brother of the present day with the jackal of the old tale, and himself with the wise rat king who had led the colony safely through the deception and brought it to an end.

Freed from the false saint's shadow, the rat colony returned to its old safety and lived on in peace, no longer deceived by appearances alone. The Bilara Jataka endures as a warning that extravagant displays of austerity, standing on one leg, fasting on air, facing the sun in apparent reverence, prove nothing about the character underneath them. No. 128 asks every reader to do what the rat king finally did: count what is actually being lost, not merely what is being performed, before placing trust in anyone's piety.